Performance Simulation of Marine Cycloidal Propellers: A Both Theoretical and Heuristic Approach

The importance of mathematical and numerical simulation in marine engineering is growing together with the complexity of the designed systems. In general, simulation a makes it possible to improve the engineering design, reducing working time and costs of production as well. In this respect, the implementation of a simulation model for cycloidal propellers is presented. Cycloidal thrusters are being increasingly used in marine applications. Their best performance concerns low-speed applications, due to their ability to steer thrust in any direction. The proposed simulator is able to assess the performance of cycloidal propellers in terms of the generated thrust and torque, without resorting to consuming and demanding computational tools, such as CFD methods. This feature makes the presented model particularly suitable for the simulation in the time domain of the maneuverability of surface units, equipped with cycloidal propellers. In this regard, after embodying the implemented model in an already existing simulation platform for maneuverability, we show the most significant outputs concerning some simulated maneuvers, performed at cruise speed.